Psychiatrist Says Schafer Is Legally Insane

Psychiatrist Richard Saul said yesterday that Robert Schafer did not know right from wrong when he walked into an Upper Bucks farmers market last August and killed the owner with a shotgun.

Saul, an expert witness for the defense, said Schafer -- a homeless man who had lived behind the Auckland Market in Richland Township until a new owner asked him to leave -- "lives in a world outside the context of reality."

In a December session with Schafer, the psychiatrist said, Schafer "was well aware that he had killed John Rumsey."

However, Saul said, Schafer "was unable to differentiate right from wrong" at the time of the killing.

Schafer, 55, believes other people, including Rumsey himself, were responsible for the killing, Saul said.

The psychiatrist also said Schafer had a history of schizophrenia dating to the 1960s.

Saul's finding that Schafer did not know right from wrong at the time of the killing is important to the defense's effort to get a verdict of not guilty by reason of insanity. In Pennsylvania, a person is considered legally insane if he does not know what he is doing or does not realize the difference between right and wrong.

The non-jury trial will resume this morning with closing arguments. The case then will go to Bucks County Judge Ward Clark, who has presided over the trial since it began last Monday.

During cross examination, prosecutor Dale Reichley used Saul's own words against the psychiatrist in an attempt to show that Saul, at one point, considered Schafer legally sane.

Reichley pointed to a report Saul made on his December meeting with the alleged murderer. In that report, Reichley pointed out, Saul wrote that Schafer "did not fully appreciate" the difference between right and wrong.

Reichley, Bucks County's First Assistant District Attorney, said that wording had more in common with the definition of guilty but mentally ill than with the definition of insanity.

Reichley then quoted from the guilty but mentally ill definition, explaining that it applies to a person who "lacks substantial capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of the act."

In other words, the verdict can be applied to a person who is mentally ill but not as ill as an insane person. Defendants judged guilty but mentally ill cannot be sentenced to death in Pennsylvania.

Reichley is seeking a straight guilty verdict and the death penalty in the first-degree murder case.

Clark ended the proceedings early in the afternoon yesterday to give himself a chance to read hundreds of pages of handwritten testimony submitted by Schafer.

Assistant Public Defender Lisa Douple said Schafer worked on the testimony for months at Bucks County Prison and had wanted to read his work in total at the trial.

He agreed not to read from his more than 600 pages of notes when Clark offered to read them, Douple said.

Even so, Schafer's testimony took up almost all of one day and part of another. During his time on the stand, Schafer went on wide tangents and blamed the murder on all the people who, he believed, had done him wrong throughout his life.

He recalled being teased by classmates at Muhlenberg College and co-workers at Merck & Co. He said he was berated by family members, including a cousin who taunted him when he failed at an attempt to commit suicide by shotgun in the 1970s.

He said he had been writing a book called "Armageddon Confronted" since 1969 and he was a quarter of the way through it.

Schafer said the central theme of his book was "sexual sharing," a theory he said God personally delivered to him.

Schafer said he began writing the book while working as a teacher of emotionally disturbed children at Allentown State Hospital.

Schafer said he determined that marriages break up when a husband or wife gets caught in an affair. If society allowed spouses to cheat, he said, marriages would stay together and children would get the love and guidance they need.

"I have come with a prophecy," he said, "a way of saving America."

But people "don't get it," Schafer said. "They don't get that I'm a prophet."